Review: 1988 – OZASIA FESTIVAL 2023 at Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Tuesday 24th October 2023.

1988 is the year that sixteen-year-old Dũng Nguyễn left his home in South Vietnam, and arrived in Melbourne, Australia to join his father, Quí Văn Nguyễn who, with two older brothers, had come to Australia by boat in 1980. In collaboration with Peter Knight, with whom he formed the band, Way Out West, he tells his story in music, aided by slide projections by Phuong Ngo. He learned traditional music from his grandfather and plays đàn tranh, a plucked zither, and đàn bầu, a single-stringed zither. After moving to Australia he studied western music at the Sydney Conservatorium, and developed an interest in jazz, learning the guitar.

Knight plays trumpet and adds electronic music using, among other things, an old Revox reel-to-reel tape deck, invoking memories of my time spent in Tristram Carey’s electronic music studio at the Elder Conservatorium here in Adelaide back in the 1980s.

They are joined by Minh Ha Patmore, đàn t’rưng, a bamboo xylophone that seemed to be set out rather like a huge hammer dulcimer, Vanessa Tomlinson, vibraphone and assorted untuned percussion, Helen Svoboda, double bass and wordless vocals, and Erik Griswold, piano and melodica. They all contributed to the compositions.

Slide projectors are used by Phuong Ngo offering signposts along the way, beginning in Melbourne, returning to family photos from Vietnam, Dung’s wedding and, finally, images from the Festival Centre and the Space Theatre, bringing the audience into the performance.

To go into detail about the music, the use of the pentatonic scale, the timbres of the various instruments, the many ways in which they were combined, the different musical backgrounds of the performers, how the instruments were not always played in traditional ways, and descriptions of each of the nine sections could take a long time and, of course, few would be particularly interested, unless any readers happened to be ethnomusicologists.

More importantly is to say that this was a fascinating and captivating performance by some exceptional musicians, combining a wide range of instruments and styles, which held the audience spellbound. Unfortunately, there was only one performance of this remarkable work. Hopefully, they’ll make a return visit sometime soon.